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Virgin Orbit is no more.
The Richard Branson-backed business finally folded after declaring bankruptcy and selling off its assets.
Virgin Orbit has struggled since it went public in 2021 via a SPAC, a process that raised substantially less than expected. Additionally, its LauncherOne rocket failed to reach orbit after taking off from the UK in January 2023.
The business didn’t get better from there. In March, Virgin Orbit announced it would let go of about 85% of its workforce, and in April, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, sending its share price down to just 15 cents.
Virgin Orbit’s assets are already being acquired by companies like Rocket Lab, which bought Virgin’s main production facility in Long Beach, California. Stratolaunch snapped up Virgin Orbit’s aircraft, and Launcher now has the company's lease on a Mojave desert test site. The company’s rockets, “in various stages of manufacturing assembly,” according to CNBC, have yet to be sold.
As Claude Rousseau, research director at Northern Sky Research, told Tech Brew at the time of the company’s bankruptcy filing, Virgin Orbit failed to convince investors of its business case, burning too much cash and rushing to the public markets too early.
“The problem is that rockets are hard, but business cases of rockets are harder,” Rousseau said at the time. “There’s actually a lot of various parameters that you need to control that are affected, not just by the technology, but also by the business environment.”
However, Branson’s space ambitions don’t seem to be entirely dead. Virgin Galactic, which Virgin Orbit spun out of and focuses on suborbital space tourism, has ended its nearly two-year hiatus and resumed flights.